Moving Media Forms Joint Venture With Cups â€˜N Strings

Pictured at Moving Mediaâ€™s new American headquarters are
(L-R) Simon Factor and Bruce Maddocks. Photo by David Goggin.

Moving Media principle Simon Factor and Cups â€˜N Strings founder Bruce Maddocks have formed a joint venture to deal with content in a wide range of broadcast video formats for encoding and distribution through worldwide digital distribution channels.

â€œWeâ€™ve worked with Bruce a number of times in the past for high-end analog audio archiving and transfer to digital formats,â€? remarked Simon Factor. â€œWe felt his team had the perfect skill set and facilities for our new operations here in America.â€?

Moving Media, with European headquarters in Dublin, Ireland, is a video encoding specialist, working with cutting edge compression systems and customized workflow to deliver optimum quality online video through digital channels such as the Internet, IPTV, VOD and mobile networks.

â€œWe aim for high volume transfer of broadcast videotape to digital file formats,â€? Factor continued. â€œWe are working with content in tape-based formats such as Beta SP and Digi Beta and transferring to digital video formats like Flash, Windows Media, and MPEG-4 for online delivery.â€?

Offering state-of-the-art facilities to encode from tape to file or provide transcoding of existing digital assets, the new studio has a strong focus on audio quality. Studio principal, Bruce Maddox has over 30 years experience in sound production, television scoring and studio design expertise, merged with extensive knowledge of mixing, mastering, analog archival and restoration.

â€œMoving Media has a strong presence in Europe and has established safe and efficient ways of transporting valuable physical assets,â€? explained Bruce Maddocks. â€œBut shipping valuable content from America to Europe and back presents sizable logistical problems. We are here in the entertainment hub of America and can easily handle content from New York City, Chicago, Miami and other US media centers.â€?

With strong broadcast engineering talent in house, Moving Mediaâ€™s LA team are well-equipped to produce output of any format for iPod, IPTV, or Archival with systems for secure VPN delivery as well as FTP and support for all-important DRM-enabled encoding.

Moving Media employs a 3-stage encoding process designed to optimize the quality of encoded video. Starting from tape, an uncompressed digital version is fine edited to exclude slates and breaks. Particular attention is paid to the useable screen area, cropping the frame to give the best results, removing noise and misalignments before checking audio phase alignments and levels. Director, Simon Factor, explains, â€œWe tend to apply the technology in our own special way. We donâ€™t see encoding as being a â€˜roll tape hit buttonâ€™ process. Our encoding service is designed to optimize the quality of the encoded video and to present the content in a way that is effective within its target platform.â€?

The studioâ€™s first project for Getty Images involved transferring a collection of several hundred clips from tape to MP4 files covering a range of archive footage from the 1920s to 1960s including public service announcements. The LA studio used Digital Rapids technology to implement fine editing, progressive scan and audio remastering measures to enhance content recorded some 40-80 years ago.

Simon concludes, â€œThe US studio is a significant move for the company and we are very happy with the reaction from both our existing customers and the market. Encoding is a hot topic at the moment and there is room in the US market for an encoding specialist. We focus only on encoding and the processes that support the delivery of digital video content.â€?